Tag: Cloud

On August 26th, Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen published a very short note on the DuckDB blog: DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, is becoming a subsidiary of Amazon Web Services. The deal closes in early September.

I read it more carefully than usual because at CARTO we’ve been using DuckDB for a relatively short time, and I’ve written here about file formats and performance and about the httpfs proxy mess. When you adopt a piece of software in production and months later a hyperscaler buys it, the least you can do is sit down and read the fine print.

In April 2021 I made my first commit to the monorepo behind CARTO’s cloud-native platform. It was PR number 9, a docker-compose. Five years later I’ve looked back with some calm and found around 450 commits, around 447 pull requests, and a presence in virtually every service in the repository.

The numbers aren’t the interesting part. What’s interesting is that, going through that history, a thread shows up that I hadn’t fully identified myself: I’ve spent half a decade connecting the platform to other people’s data warehouses. Six different providers — BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, Oracle and PostgreSQL — each with its own credential model, its pooling, its timeouts and its error messages.

Amazon has taken an important step in the world of artificial intelligence with the launch of S3 Vectors, the first cloud storage service with native support for large-scale vectors. This innovation promises to reduce costs by up to 90% for uploading, storing, and querying vector data.

What are vectors and why do we care?

Vectors are numerical representations of unstructured data (text, images, audio, video) generated by embedding models. They are the foundation of generative AI applications that need to find similarities between data using distance metrics.

Daily life has kept me from doing many things, including keeping this blog updated, but there’s no time for everything, and in the end fatigue forces me to reorganize priorities.

In recent months, I’ve been working on implementing RedHat CloudForms, Ansible Tower, and more, so I’ve had to work much more with Ansible. It was already a habit, but lately it’s been much more intensive.

So I’ve earned a few RedHat “certifications”:

I have always said: ” there are two types of people: Those who have lost data and those who have not yet“. Given this scenario, we try to do everything in our power to safeguard all the information we have on computers in the safest way.